Family says it found toenails in ALDI bread

Son German Reyes and mother Monica Gutierrez, both of Whitehall, pose with… (APRIL BARTHOLOMEW, THE…)

June 29, 2013|By Spencer Soper, Of The Morning Call

Monica Gutierrez and her daughter were enjoying ham and cheese sandwiches on wheat buns purchased from discount grocer ALDI when Gutierrez found something hard in her mouth and spit it out.

She made little of it until her daughter made a similar discovery moments later while chewing.

They began inspecting the remaining portions of their sandwiches and the bites they pulled from their mouths and found what they now suspect are five toenail clippings — several hard, curved objects — embedded in the bread.

"I noticed an object, thick and hard, and I spit it out," said Gutierrez, 49, of Whitehall Township. "I just thought it was gross, beyond belief."

Daughter Camila Reyes, 24, said she and her mother inspected the remaining L'Oven Fresh buns with a fork to find the mysterious, hard objects.

"Then you could see it clearly," Reyes said. "It was clippings of toenails. I got nauseous and almost threw up. After that I didn't want to touch the sandwich. We were just in shock. We didn't know what to do."

The Gutierrez family filed a complaint with the federal Food and Drug Administration, but the agency on Friday would not give any indication of how the complaint is being handled. ALDI said it has notified the bread manufacturer, which it declined to identify.

Precisely what will happen next is unclear, and several variables complicate the situation. The family discovered the alleged foreign objects four days after purchasing the bread. The rolls are not in tamper-proof packaging. ALDI buys the bread from a supplier. And the family has denied the bread manufacturer's request for the foreign material so it can be analyzed.

Meanwhile, the uneaten and partially chewed sandwich portions sit on a plate covered in plastic in Gutierrez's freezer, because the family is preserving them as evidence for independent analysis. And Gutierrez and her daughter remain grossed out by the experience. Gutierrez said she vomited the day she discovered the foreign objects in her sandwich and couldn't eat the rest of that day.

"I can't eat bread," she said.

ALDI is a German company that operates about 1,200 stores in the United States, including several in the Lehigh Valley. It has a reputation for offering low-priced, no-frills foods in small stores with just a few aisles. A dozen eggs, for instance, cost 78 cents at the MacArthur Road store, where shoppers have to leave a 25-cent deposit for a shopping cart and a security guard stands beside the cashier.

Low prices and proximity to her home are what initially attracted Gutierrez to ALDI. She said she has been a loyal customer for three years.

ALDI officials declined to be interviewed for this story. The company issued the following statement:

"At ALDI, ensuring the high quality of our products is a top priority and we have protocols in place that cover a wide variety of quality initiatives. When this situation was brought to our attention, we immediately began an investigation. We interviewed the customer and we reached out to our supplier so that they could launch its (sic) own examination into what may have happened. Our current understanding of the situation is that our supplier has requested that the customer share the remaining product so that it may be analyzed by an independent laboratory to determine if there was a foreign material in the product and, if so, what it is and how it may have gotten there. At this time, our understanding is that the customer is still deciding whether or not he wishes to participate in the investigative process."

Gutierrez said she purchased a package of L'Oven Fresh wheat buns topped with oat bran at ALDI's MacArthur Road store on May 28. L'Oven Fresh is a brand made exclusively for ALDI. She discovered the foreign objects four days later while eating sandwiches with her daughter on June 1. That was the first day she opened the package of buns, she said.

She considered various other possibilities for contamination. Could someone have been clipping their toenails in her kitchen? No, she says. She and her daughter always do such grooming in the bathroom.

Camila Reyes said the foreign material is much larger than clippings from her toes or her mother's toes.

"When I looked at the nail clippings, they looked very wide," she said. "That's why I thought they were toenail clippings. My mom and I have small toes. Obviously, it's not from one of us."

Reyes said she discovered something on her second bite, which was only bread, and the material was embedded in the bread. She had not reached ham or cheese yet, which was toward the center of the sandwich.

Gutierrez figured some people would suspect this is a hoax, which is why she wrapped the evidence and put it in the freezer so it could be analyzed.